Sharp unveiled the much awaited proof of pudding for the IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) LCD panel technology. IGZO acts as a superior substrate material to amorphous silicon, thanks to higher electron mobility, and lets you achieve either higher pixel density, or faster response times. Sharp chose the former, and launched the PN-K321. This 32-inch professional desktop/workstation monitor packs a native resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. To draw those many pixels from its source, it relies on DisplayPort, although HDMI is also available. It is priced at the equivalent of US $5,500, and could be unveiled stateside at CES 2013 (January).

QuadHD, or similar, -like resolution available to consumers... finally. Now if only they'd lower the price by a factor of 10.

Edit: I don't expect AMD Sea Islands or nVidia Kepler refresh is anything close to powerful enough to power these resolutions, and clogging 3-4 GPUs togheter is no realistic option, especially not for the average gamer (or other consumer types that need better resolutions with a passion).

But Volcanic Islands and Maxwell hopefully will be built with scaling with high-resolutions (and filtering at the same time) in mind.

The price really doesn't worry me, at all. Remember when 1080p TVs used to cost just as much? It really wasn't that long ago, like 4-5 years... Now you can buy one for under 500$ and I think the same will happen with 4k monitors - people are tired of 1080p and want 4k, but not at prices like that, so sooner or later they will drop the prices so they actually sell these beasts.

The price really doesn't worry me, at all. Remember when 1080p TVs used to cost just as much? It really wasn't that long ago, like 4-5 years... Now you can buy one for under 500$ and I think the same will happen with 4k monitors - people are tired of 1080p and want 4k, but not at prices like that, so sooner or later they will drop the prices so they actually sell these beasts.

Click to expand...

EXACTLY... 1080p will be around for a bit, but this price will of course drop as well.

hmm, considering i payed the equivalent of 1325 USD (7500 nok in 2012, 6700 nok in 2006) for a screen that in the end gave me a Dell WFP 3008 i could probably pay something like 2000 USd for a screen like that 32". next year or 2014 maybe?